The sudden shift of funds to research on bioterrorism may already be paying …

Share this story

When people think of bioterrorism, one of first things that comes to mind is Anthrax, a bacteria that produces an exceptionally toxic protein and can be spread as a very long-lived spore form. It has already been used successfully within the US, having caused both fatal infections and long-term problems with contamination. Another legacy of these attacks was an increase in funding for projects that address the danger of future attacks. Some recent reports suggest that some of that money is paying off. In the first, researchers took advantage of the known structure of the anthrax toxin to design a compound that can neutralize it. It's often possible to design a chemical that can fit into a known protein structure, which this group was able to do. But the researchers recognized that the toxin is assembled from subunits with a repeated structure, so they took their chemical and linked it into a repeating structure and the same spacing. They compared the result to two lego blocks snapping together: the longer the match, the greater the specificity and strength of the pairing. They were able to show that their compound worked to block the toxin's activity when tested in mice.

This still doesn't prevent people from getting infected, though, which is where the second announcement comes in. The researchers took advantage of the fact that bacteria suffer from one of the same problems we do: they get viruses, called phages, which burst out of bacterial cells, ready to infect their neighbors. To perform this trick, the phages need to actually explode the cell, so they produce proteins specifically for this purpose. Workers at Rockefeller University have now isolated phages that target anthrax, and cloned the cell-exploding proteins from them. One of the new proteins specifically targets anthrax, so it's less likey to disrupt the normal bacterial populations humans carry. Since fewer bacteria suffer the effects, it's also unlikely to generate the broad resistance that traditional antibiotics have caused. The researchers are working to produce a solution that's loaded with both this protein and chemicals that will induce the activation of anthrax spores. When a contaminated surface is sprayed with this solution, it should wake up the antrax and promptly kill them.